Tag Archives: somerville

My dad has always joked that when I eventually own property I will ask how much it would cost to pave my yard. I’ve never really cared for plants. Sure, they’re pretty, but they’re work. You have to know so much about them like their name, how much sunlight and water they need, the best place to plant them. They’re like children. No thanks.

I’ve had a jade plant for a few years in my apartment, but it just got lumped into the collective plants of the house and someone else cares for it. I’m confident that I could keep that plant alive if all the responsibility fell on me, but any other type of plant, I’m not so sure.

And thus, #30 Grow Tomatoes was created. Why tomatoes? Because if I am going to grow something, I want to be able to eat it. “These are from my garden,” I hoped to say as a dropped a barrel of tomatoes on a table in the break room at work. “Take as many as you want. I’ve already canned so many!”

Last Saturday, I headed over to Ricky’s Flower Market in Union Square, Somerville. It’s hard when you have no idea what you’re looking at or looking for. I expected a ton of signage denoting the location of this tomato plant, but I got lost. Juan, one of their incredibly knowledgeable employees, eventually found me and helped me locate one of their plants. It was a tall plant, but the weight of the two tomatoes caused the vines to droop.

“Okay, so now what do I do with it?”

“You need to pot it in a bigger pot and tie it to some stakes.” I just looked at him. He just looked at me, grabbed the plant, and headed towards a work station. “Come with me.”

Obviously, Juan didn’t want me to have the chance to immediately kill this thing. He re-potted it for me with some soil into a bigger pot and used old stakes to tie the vines up. Viola!

Thanks, Juan! He’s the best.

Once I got the plant home, I read the instructions on the back of the card. Apparently, I was growing Roma Tomatoes. I’ve heard of those.

These Big Mama’s need direct sunlight for six hours. After about fifteen minutes of walking around my yard and house, I settled on a small area of concrete to the right of my stairs for these to grow.

Fearing that this plant would get stolen, much like my bike off the porch in the Fall of 2010, I named her Renee (as in “Don’t Walk Away, Renee (… and into the back of some thiefs truck on trash night)”).

Well, on Monday night the plant didn’t get stolen, but my beautiful tomatoes did. Was it a squirrel? Unlikely, but possible. Was it a thief who threw my tomatoes in to the back of his pick up truck on trash night? HIGHLY LIKELY.

Give me back my tomatoes! Give me back my bike!

I’ve moved Renee inside and I am going to put her with the rest of the house plants. There are no other tiny tomatoes or buds that look like they’re going to sprout into something this season, but I’ll keep Renee around and see what happens next year.

It is so rare that friends of mine celebrate their birth with an activity other than straight up drinking. In fact, only one friend comes to mind and this is the second year we have celebrated another year of his life by bowling.

But not just any regular ol’ bowling and not just at any regular bowling alley. Frank is a candlepin bowling aficionado and, until recently, had never set foot inside Ball Square Bowling.

You see, Ball Square Bowling is not open to the public. I’ve lived about four blocks from it for almost two years and have only seen people bowling inside twice. Thanks to Frank being at the right place at the right time, he was able to talk to the manager and rent it out for his birthday. And thus my quest to bowl there was finally going to come to fruition.

We played a few strings before the alcohol took control and random balls started flying down all eight lanes. At this point in the evening I got a strike while emulating some ridiculous move from Zumba class. I will now always throw like I am chopping wood.

The manager that night was kind enough to take us back behind the scenes and show us how the pins were automatically set up and the balls returned. It was pretty cool – as you can tell from my face.

(Also, that is Frank on my shirt. It’s pretty much the best shirt ever. I have three.)

The pins are fed up through this machine and then slide down these little chutes to form their ten pin formation. It’s totally old school and you can tell it’s a “they don’t make ‘em like they used to!” type of machine. The machine was so loud you could barely hear Frank scream “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!”

Behind the pins was a turntable spinning at a 1000000 MPH to help return the balls down the lane. That remained a bit of a mystery. I was far too fascinated by the pins.

We were standing just above the pins on this rickety plywood that, thank goodness, did not bust with ten of us standing on top of it. They also don’t make wood like they used to.